lightweight image authentication and encryption in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is dramatically increasing and, at the same time, is facing significant growth of security issues because of the very limited resources of connected devices. This study introduces Lightweight Authentication Encryption (LAE), an algorithm optimized for resource-constrained IoT systems. IoT connects different devices for smart homes, healthcare, and manufacturing. However, these systems have huge security challenges because of the limited resources, for example, power, memory, and processing power, among others. Old encryption algorithms tend to consume too many resources, and this is not good for IoT devices. As a result, lightweight cryptography has emerged as a remedy that strikes a balance between the security measures and resources employed. The LAE algorithm involves the use of two critical cryptographic techniques, which are combined. The IoT is dramatically increasing and, at the same time, is facing significant growth of security issues because of the very limited resources of connected devices. Stream ciphers for confidentiality and hash functions for the integrity of data. The stream cipher is used to provide confidentiality by the translation of plaintext to ciphertext, whilst hash functions are used to provide data integrity by producing a unique value to detect changes that occur to data. The performance of the LAE algorithm is benchmarked against the ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption method. Results display competitive execution times and low memory consumption to ChaCha20Poly1305, therefore making it more compatible with IoT devices. The proposed algorithm can be applied to ensure the integrity of encrypted data, which resolves the security issue of data in transit or at rest.